Congratulations to Garrette Carson Sutherland who on Wednesday, February 4, 2026, successfully defended his dissertation proposal.
The title of Garrette’s study is "LEADERSHIP ACROSS WORLDS: AN INTERPRETIVE INQUIRY INTO URBAN AND RURAL PRINCIPALSHIP IN BELIZE THROUGH A TRANSFORMATIONAL LENS".
Overview of Problem: Belize continues to pursue equity and quality in education, yet the daily realities of school leadership are not experienced evenly across the country. Urban principals may have larger staffing structures and more consistent access to technology, while rural principals often lead with limited resources, teacher shortages, and multigrade realities. Although both groups operate under the same national policies and legal mandates, leadership development and support systems rarely differentiate between urban and rural contexts. As a result, there remains limited empirical understanding of how Belizean primary school principals interpret their roles and lead within contrasting contexts.
Research Purpose: Guided by Transformational Leadership Theory, this interpretive qualitative study explores how Belizean primary school principals conceptualize and enact leadership across urban and rural settings. The study centers on principals’ lived experiences to understand how context shapes both the leadership challenges they encounter and the strategies they use to motivate staff, strengthen school culture, and pursue improvement.
Research Design: This study will use an interpretive qualitative research design, applying transformational leadership as the theoretical lens to examine principals’ lived experiences and meaning-making.
Sample: Sixteen full-time Belizean primary school principals (8 urban, 8 rural) will be selected through purposive maximum-variation sampling across Belize’s six districts. Participants will have at least three years of principalship experience.
Data Collection and Analysis: Data will be collected through semi-structured interviews (approximately 70 minutes each), a brief demographic form, and the researcher’s reflexive journal. Interviews will be audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and stored securely. Analysis will follow Yin’s five-phase qualitative approach and will also integrate in vivo coding with a priori codes aligned to the Four I’s of transformational leadership (idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration). Findings will be compared across cases to examine patterns and differences between urban and rural leadership experiences.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE CHAIR:
Dr. Shelley B. Wepner
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Dr. Yiping Wan
Dr. Lynn Allen
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